An Elizabethan
who did not live in London lived in the country. Actually he might inhabit
a township or a city of no mean importance; all over England the towns were growing rapidly in
size and wealth. But in essence London was, as the fourteenth‑century Scots poet had
called it, "of townes A per Se". It was the largest in Europe. It
had a population, variously estimated today, of one to some three hundred
thousand. It stood alone, unique; it was 'the town", town life was London
life. Never before or since has it bulked quite so large in the imagination
of the people (...), at no other time has it so focused, so concentrated,
so dominated the national being.
Although Elizabeth
continued the custom of making royal progresses throughout the realm, the
Court in her reign may be said finally to have lost its original migratory
character. It became once and for all essentially associated with and situated
in London. It was in this reign therefore that the Government and the Privy
Council came to regard London as their permanent abode. Thus naturally there
gravitated to the source of all advancement and the seat of power the ability,
the culture, the wisdom, and the riches of the whole kingdom; London took
to it itself the resurgent energies of the nation.
Tudor London,
more particularly towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, was an overcrowded
and insanitary city, but it was, as a whole, undeniably picturesque and
parts of it were beautiful. The Thames with its bridge, its palaces, its
gardens, its swans, and its multitude of vessels, was the
pride of every Londoner; old St Paul's was the finest ecclesiastical building
in the country, and was, indeed, England's pride. When the disastrous fire destroyed it we lost what had been the
largest of English cathedrals and the most magnificent. The way in which
it dominated the City can well be realized from the contemporary
views, and before it lost its graceful spire, struck by lightning in
1561, this had soared high above all the hundred and twenty church spires
which rose from every quarter of the city.
Although the
Tudor period saw much building in and around London, as well as the erection
of noblemen's palaces and of Sir Thomas Gresham's famous Royal Exchange, it saw also
the beginning of the overcrowding of the metropolis, with which problem the
authorities have found themselves confronted ever since. Not only had the
population steadily increased, but it had been augmented by the influx of
all those restless spirits who flocked to Court to make their fortunes and
who generally forsook the country and took up their permanent abode in London.
Overcrowding
had already begun to create slums. Nothing creates a slum quarter more quickly
than old houses that have come down in the world. The palace that was originally
designed for some nobleman and his enormous establishment becomes first
the tenement house and then the rabbit‑warren, the plague spot, crowded
from garret to cellar with dirty, poverty‑stricken wretches.
Gardens and open
spaces admittedly there were throughout the length and breadth of Elizabethan London. They helped to sweeten the air
in slum localities, but (...) they were being encroached upon, so that the
bad condition of the streets of the town intensified the evils resulting
from the bad housing conditions. Except for its two or three main thoroughfares
London was a network of narrow, badly paved lanes, half darkened by the
overhanging fronts of the houses, and rendered wholly unsavoury by the unpleasant
habit which prevailed of depositing all the garbage in the kennel or in
front of one's door.